Comments - AGameAnx

Mod does require more PC resources than standard game due to increased amount of scripts and generally improved AI. COH is mostly bottlenecked by single-thread CPU performance, so if you have old PC but it's still pretty good in terms of single-core CPU performance, you might be ok. A lot of models have extra accessories, but you can probably adjust this with the model detail slider in the settings, as well as other settings. Some textures are also higher resolution and there are minor special effects that are added graphics-wise, but that doesn't really impact performance much.

Try the following please:
- Right-click the mod in library tab and select Properties.
- Navigate to the Local Files tab and click on the Verify Integrity of Game Cache option.

Yeah british AI has also gotten lots of attention

Thank you! The amount of changes is too large to list. The whole weapon model is redone, new mechanics are added, everything is rebalanced, campaign is in progress of getting updated (including new objectives/balance for the more iconic missions), a lot of AI improvements and extra features. Check out our articles for more details.

Regarding AI infantry use - it just uses its resources as much as it can, it's not like it can choose to have more fuel, although I do usually give it a pretty high priority to upgrade its infantry with global upgrades, this is based on some factors which get randomly decided at the start of the game.

The manpower bonus it has is much higher than its fuel bonus.

We tried a bigger fuel bonus for it not that long ago, but it feels kind of overwhelming how fast it gets tanks and how many there are for a short while. But then as you begin to hard counter vehicles with lots of AT it also hurts AI as it can't really make a decision to NOT spend its fuel, best it can do is to start purchasing more indirect fire vehicles.

Currently it gets quite a lot of vehicles on higher difficulties but I think maybe this could be very slightly increased. I'll consider it and maybe review the lower difficulty resource bonuses a bit.

Thanks for the nice words!

We're working quite hard to finish it, but it's always impossible to guess when it'll be finished. When it's ready!

Yes

Yes, shouldn't be any problem

I don't think so. However, I heard from somebody on our discord that they were able to implement the cheat mod into our mod without any issues whatsoever. No idea on the details but that's what I heard.

Really high praise... Awesome comment, thank you so much!

We'll probably do an actual general gameplay changes article before release as well, as there were a lot of updates in that regard. I guess that's why I had a lot to say.

It really wasn't that long ago where we basically thought of tanks as infinite value generators which are quite toxic on combat and how players interact... With max range shots stopping fights before they started, and armor, which meant that defensive players would never be in danger of losing their tank blob. All of this balance changed drastically in 5.0 and we're still in the process of fine-tuning it all.

There was a period of time where both the overall damage infantry takes and the speed of tanks was reduced. We introduced a new criticals system along with that to make tanks not just boring paperweight, which also included a hefty vehicle hitpoint buff. In 5.0 tanks will take a few more hits but will suffer more temporary and mild criticals, indicating them taking real damage. It feels quite unique and cool.

In the most recent iteration now tanks are once again meant to feel very powerful and mobile, the mobility values are back to what they were originally.

Despite us bringing back the mobility, and increasing the damage almost completely back to where it used to be, tanks also retained their survivability that was added with the criticals system. This is because of AT guns receiving a hefty range buff. AT guns are now properly able to dislodge defensive tank positions, mitigating a playstyle which used to be a massive balance issue of our mod.

The overall result so far is that tanks don't get to slowly bleed the opponent out by constantly poking them down from max range anymore (at least not nearly as much), it is much more about being mobile and avoiding arcs of fire. The tanks won't have as much of a combat up-time, but their immediate damage output is much more rapid. Feels a lot more fun in my opinion.

All of the above does apply to T3 units to some degree but those have seen a ton of rebalances of their own. Generally the T3 vehicles and lighter tanks remain extremely fragile. Staying on T3 for prolonged time is definitely possible, but it's not the same playstyle. It's one of those cases where the risk vs reward becomes too great after a while, and it's a tempo-based approach, mostly suitable for players who are supremely confident in their play and multitasking. Heavy tanks are much more of a brute force approach, often used for supplementing a solid core of infantry. And obviously there are playstyles which still focus mostly on infantry too (they're even enabled much more heavily in 5.0 due to conversion), something that doesn't exist in coh2 at all.

TL;DR - the balance concerns are probably warranted, but power level of tanks has been changed a lot and considered quite carefully. Judging it from a short bit of text or by looking at the initial costs is difficult. Tanks have seen major usability, accessibility and strength improvements over the course of 5.0 development, so even if these costs seem high, keep in mind that we basically only buffed them since 4.1.

Thanks for reading, if you've gotten this far. I typed so much I then hesitated to post it. I bet you weren't prepared for an article within an article...

It's not wrong to say this at all. We might buff these vehicles further, the balance of everything is constantly in flux despite us working on this version for a very long time and quite actively now.

The heavy tanks have received a major set of cost buffs and T4/Tank techs have gotten cheaper just very recently, the numbers we've presented here are not very likely to be final on quite a few things, this is just to give a general idea of the faction's base arsenal.

That said, it's actually not that big of a deal to gather that much resources for a tank. It's expensive, true, but you can control your resources much easier with our conversion and upkeep abilities. It's much more likely that you will be able to align your resources perfectly due to conversion. The overall flow of resources has been changed drastically in 5.0 too, it's definitely not impossible to afford these tanks. I'd say you'll see slightly fewer units overall, but upkeep is also reduced slightly and reliance on territory is also reduced.

We're also preparing a command tree article which will further give an idea of how the factions play now. Due to command trees being quite flexible it's not that difficult to get "stepping stone" units which allow you to rush heavier tanks a lot more easily than in the past. On the other side of the coin, you can also rush quite powerful things on the command tree but the way those paths are designed might require you to invest more heavily in the base faction arsenal to not die to enemy pressure. For sure there was quite a long period of time where 5.0 felt like the best playstyle was to make various compositions of T1 to T3 units and then follow up with powerful doctrinal abilities or units. We're very aware of this being a delicate balance.

In my opinion coh2 tanks are already too game ending and too insanely powerful, I think our tank power level is still slightly below that of coh2. Sure, the power of coh2 tanks is offset by abundance of disabling abilities and very powerful and accessible AT guns and tank destroyers, but that's not how CoH1 is designed. Tank combat just feels different, in our mod it's mostly about keeping mid to long range and the general progression of combat in our mod is very different - much more methodical. Coh2 is very a-move-around-the-whole-map-oriented until super lategame where instead it becomes blob vs blob. I like how battles feel in our mod a lot lot more.

I'm assuming you're the same person that asked this in discord? 4.1 has a 'Launch back to basics.url' file included with it, it should be located in your coh dir after extraction.

Unfortunately it seems this is outside of the realm of possibility for us :( We missed the window

Thank you!

US faction can build the triage center and recruit medics from it.

Medics function much like officers with a follow command. They also have a 'Field Dressing' ability which costs a small amount of munitions and allows to quickly heal a selected squad. This ability is just about the only healing ability that works in combat, however it makes the medic more exposed to enemy fire.

Lots of thoughts on it, low chances of it actually happening.

In 5.0 they can purchase a recoiless rifle.

The way AI artillery sees the fog of war units is through a VERY slow history grid. If you sit in 1 place for too long only then will it figure out to bombard it. You have to sit for A VERY long time for it to actually cheat and bombard a backline position without ever seeing. However, if it sees this position at any point then this history buffer also gets affected and so the fog of war barrages will also speed up on this position. The funny part about this system is that AI can also miss the barrages / barrage nothing, because the decay of history data is quite slow too. Keep in mind that if it sees stuff to bombard on the frontline, it'll bombard that because usually the visible stuff has much higher priority and it always picks the highest priority to bombard.

This is very close how a human would play. If you move around at all it shouldn't feel like it's cheating at all.

I have no idea about the crashes, we never have crashes. Unless you mean scar/scripting errors which stop the game mode and AI from working / pause the game with an error. Those can happen sometimes if I commit some broken stuff to the repository but I usually fix it pretty fast. Current files should work fine and there's a lot of new AI updates and some neat gameplay updates too so I recommend updating.

Thanks for your feedback!

I've addressed tank reversing today, feels a lot better now. The goal with pathfinding redesign was to make tanks use curved paths (rather than pivot in place) and maintain direction a lot more than before, but obviously the reversing became too common. It's hard to make it perfect but I think it should feel a lot better now.

The missing strings is simply because we're too lazy to copy over the english strings file to other languages, should be resolved for release and I think Celution copied them over now again but some stuff will get broken again if we add new strings.

Replied to the original commenter. .module files were automatically changed in a slight way by git, my bad! Redownload them (or pull) and it should work!

Hey. We've managed to track down what the issue was. The problem was that git was updating the newline symbols for the .module files, and COH basically failed to read the module files for that reason. The issue should now be fixed if you pull the newest version, or redownload the mod or the .module files!

I'm pretty stumped.

Look, I've just created a mod discord server, seeing all the people having issues made me think it would be worth doing this sort of troubleshooting real time. I'm still setting it up, we'll probably make a news post about all of this stuff when it's ready. Join and maybe we can go through the whole process with you posting screens and whatnot: Discord.gg

Also, I suggest you pull from gitlab again if you weren't doing that, because maybe there was some kind of issue with the version you cloned/downloaded.

Otherwise, these are absolutely the exact files we are using, nothing is ignored in the .gitignore other than core game files.

If it's none of the above, my best guess would be that we have some weird required file in the core game files that we somehow modified, but this should be extremely unlikely.

One way or another, it's best we got to the bottom of this problem sooner rather than later. If we fail to fix it, I will reinstall the game and try to take the same steps you took to reproduce it.

And one last thing, I don't know if there's some information to be found in warnings.log files, I am being told the chances of that are pretty low, nevertheless, you should check them in C:\Users\*\Documents\My Games\Company of Heroes Relaunch. There's warnings.log itself, and the LogFiles folder which contains a bunch of stuff, although I'm not sure if those are only created when using -dev. Let me know what you find.

moddb is messing with your message. I got the email and your target line looks fine to me... I don't know why it's not working. I do see you've initially replied and the -mod parameter was BackToBasics - that is incorrect. It has to be -mod Improved -dev. Generally, check out our main mod description, the 'Launching the mod' section. Just make sure to replace any BackToBasics mod ids to Improved, and add -dev... You seem to have done it correctly, as long as you weren't using BackToBasics as the mod id... So I don't know why it's not working. Perhaps you could try the other methods described in the main mod description. Also, the module files are in the same folder where your BackToBasics.module files were, correct? Same folder where RelicCOH.exe is?

Are you using the steam game list & command line parameters, the steam shortcut, or alternative way to launch (reliccoh.exe or steam.exe shortcut)? Because for these 3 different methods the command line will look different. Please specify which one exactly you're using and then copy paste the entire target line here so I can fix it :)

I am assuming you downloaded both the main folder and the module files? Put them into coh dir and then the launch command should look like this (perhaps you missed the -dev?):

-mod Improved -dev

And then you can add this:

-novsync -unlock_all_missions -nomovies

Assuming you did this correctly, it should work.

I should mention that the enfilade mechanic is still easier to abuse for the player who has a numbers advantage, as they are free to occupy all the squads in 1 to 1 combat and then use the extra squads to flank and abuse the new mechanic. It does not directly benefit the player with a disadvantage. The point of it, is that it emphasizes movement & smart positioning over simply a-moving and abusing numbers, or sitting in cover. It's another layer of skill to exploit and use as a player, but given equal skill it's not really a thing that will rubber band the winning player from winning harder.

The issue of snowballing is a big thing in COH games that I discuss with Celution constantly. We've made major steps in improving it through various other means - through introducing economy upgrades, through lessening the impact of territory, and generally monitoring this situation a lot more. Small things help a lot.

The main mechanic which prevents the snowballing from becoming too difficult to overcome in COH is of course the retreat distance. Having territory impact the outcome of the game less means that you are more free to abuse the retreat distance advantage if you do end up losing some fights and losing territory, the resource disadvantage isn't quite as immediate and overbearing.

On the other hand, we've added a slow self healing mechanic to all squads which encourages players to retreat less and to take more daring actions. And then we also changed the reinforce times and fixed up the costs. The base income is also different which interacts with all of these changes in major ways. Generally, there's a lot less spam of units happening and a lot harder to make up a perfect composition, the composition choices actually happen throughout all the game. And finally, we've changed the lategame duration of fights drastically, which also emphasizes all of the above. It's pretty much impossible to summarize it, I don't know why I went into this wall of text just now :D There's a lot of small touches we've done to generally improve the feeling of the game in these regards but it's a never ending process.

The idea behind enfilading fire is that positioning makes it possible to overcome a numbers disadvantage and encourages moving around rather than balling up. Perhaps you didn't realize that it's based on how far apart the squads shooting at the enemy are rather than simply how many.

The mechanic makes it so that the dynamic of combat is often about crushing the squads protecting the flanks and then collapsing on the enemy positions.

It really makes a ton of sense, considering that pretty much every possible way of taking cover would still not prevent you from getting shot in the back when flanked.

It can be subtle, it can be very much fight-deciding to interact with this mechanic. It's certainly one my favorite things ever that we've added.

How awesome :D This is what modding is all about, cool to see you tuning stuff on your own. Thank you very much for the kind words and the feedback.

Most of that stuff is reworked now. Yeah, sgts were quite expensive before. AI has seen major improvements too. Like the comment below states, I sure hope we actually release something soon.

There's a gitlab page where one can get a dev version of the mod now, too. Viewing the page requires a free account, but otherwise the files are there to download/clone:

Gitlab.com

We should probably be releasing beta versions all this time... The mod went through multiple major iterations now since the last released version.

Trying the new version will be feel like a massive difference, and there isn't currently a way to know what exactly changed. Of course, there's the changelog but it's massive. We even introduced a whole new additional combat mechanic, and made critical, health and other reworks for vehicles, so even some the basic core gameplay aspects are different now.

If somebody does end up downloading the dev version then I can explain in more detail what is different. Celution already answered a recent comment explaining some things if you're interested in the basic rundown.

Anyway, sorta randomly felt like posting that. Thanks again for the nice comment :D

Other mods were helped by relic, but I don't know what relic did exactly. For us it'd probably have to be something like steam direct, yeah, which obviously makes it very complicated...